A Massachusetts zoo has come up with a rather simple way to help their already miserable animals beat the miserable heat: five-gallon blood popsicles and other frozen treats.
Frosty, the Denver Zoo’s only male polar bear, is dead.
In America we have cutesy petting zoos with gentle little lambs, but in China, the feeding of animals for fun can get a bit more hardcore. According to the AFP, a wildlife park near Beijing creates feeding spectacles by letting tourists buy live chickens ($4) and goats ($60) to feed to hungry lions. This and other “ethically questionable practices” at zoos has prompted an animal protection law, China’s first.
Over the weekend a baby deer somehow wandered into the lion exhibit of the National Zoo in Washington D.C. As about 100 onlookers watched, the deer was predictably attacked by the lions, but somehow managed to escape, only to be euthanized by zoo officials afterwards. Here is video of the incident that one of the zoo patrons captured. Read more »
Parting Shot: Baring It All
German zookeepers are baffled why this Spectacled Bear, a South American species traditionally found in the wild not a cage, has lost nearly all of its fur. |NYT|
Photo by Jan Woitas/EPP
Veterinarians failed to save the life of a Coney Island walrus suffering from pneumonia. A lifelong captive of the New York Aquarium, 2-year-old Akittuusaw is finally free to join Ayvek, his father who was killed by infection last year, wherever it is that dead zoo animals go. |NYDN|
Parting Shot: Caged In
Photographer Simon Kossoff explores the bleak artificial environments of animal enclosures in this photo essay. |JPG|
Artists Trash Animal Habitats in Vienna Zoo
Vienna’s Schönbrunn Zoo is trashed: a toxic waste barrel on the aquarium reef, a car wreck in the rhino’s watering hole, an oil pump in the penguin pen, and old bathtubs and signs dumped in the crocodile lagoon. These were just some of the installations created by artists Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempft for “Trouble in Paradise,” a new project commenting on “the troubled relationship of nature and civilization” from within the idyllic manmade animal enclosures. The installation is on view through October 18th after which the garbage gets cleaned up.
After the highly publicized birth of a female baby panda at a zoo in Bangkok, the people there have all-but-forgotten Thailand’s national symbol, the elephant. In a seriously misguided effort to bring some attention to the “neglected giants,” they were painted to look like pandas and mercilessly paraded about. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Or they could hire this guy, when he decorates an elephant it’s guaranteed to create a stir. |DailyMail|
Photo by Reuters
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